Sinhala, also known as Sinhalese , is the native language of the Sinhalese people, who
make up the largest ethnic group in Sri Lanka, numbering about 16 million. Sinhala is also
spoken, as a second language by other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, totalling about 3 million.
It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Sinhala is one of
the official and national languages of Sri Lanka. Sinhala, along with Pali, played a
major role in the development of Theravada Buddhist literature.
Sinhala has its own writing system, the Sinhala alphabet, which is a member of the Brahmic
family of scripts, and a descendant of the ancient Indian Brahmi script.
The oldest Sinhala Prakrit inscriptions found are from the 3rd to 2nd century BCE following
the arrival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, the oldest existing literary works date from the
9th century CE. The closest relative of Sinhala is the language
of the Maldives and Minicoy Island, Dhivehi.
Etymology Sinhala is a Sanskrit term; the corresponding
Middle Indic word is Sīhala; the actual Sinhala term is heḷa oreḷu. The Sanskrit and the
Middle Indic words have as their first element the word "lion" in the respective languages.
According to legend, Sinhabahu or Sīhabāhu, was the son of a princess of the Vanga Kingdom
and a lion. He killed his father and became king of Vanga. His son, Prince Vijaya, would
emigrate from Bengal to Lanka and become the progenitor of the Sinhala people. Taking into
account linguistic and mythological evidence, we can assume that the first element of the
name of the people means "lion". As for the second element la, local tradition
connects it to the Sanskrit root lā- "to seize", as to translate it "lion-seizer" or
"lion-killer", or to Sanskrit loha/Sinhala lē "blood", to have it mean "lion blood".
From a linguistic point of view, however, neither interpretation is convincing, so that
we can only safely say that the word Sinhala is somehow connected to a term meaning "lion".
History According to the chronicle Mahavamsa, written
in Pali, Prince Vijaya and his entourage merged with two exotic tribes of ancient India present
in Lanka, the Yakkha and Naga peoples. In the following centuries, there was substantial
immigration from Eastern India which led to an admixture of features of Eastern Prakrits.
Stages of historical development The development of the Sinhala language is
divided into four periods: Sinhala Prakrit
Proto-Sinhala Medieval Sinhala
Modern Sinhala Phonetic development
The most important phonetic developments of the Sinhala language include
the loss of the aspiration distinction in plosives
the shortening of all long vowels Long vowels in the modern language are due to borrowings
and sandhi phenomena either after elision of intervocalic consonants or in originally
compound words. the simplification of consonant clusters and
geminate consonants into geminates and single consonants respectively
development of to Western vs. Eastern Prakrit features
An example for a Western feature in Sinhala is the retention of initial which developed
into in the Eastern languages. An example of an Eastern feature is the ending -e for
masculine nominative singular in Sinhala Prakrit. There are several cases of vocabulary doublets,
e.g. the words mässā and mäkkā, which both correspond to Sanskrit makṣikā but
stem from two regionally different Prakrit words macchiā and makkhikā.
Ecology Substratum influence in Sinhala
According to Geiger, Sinhala has features that set it apart from other Indo-Aryan languages.
Some of the differences can be explained by the substrate influence of the parent stock
of the Vedda language. Sinhala has many words that are only found in Sinhala, or shared
between Sinhala and Vedda and not etymologically derivable from Middle or Old Indo-Aryan. Common
examples are kola for leaf in Sinhala and Vedda, dola for pig in Sinhala and offering
in Vedda. Other common words are rera for wild duck, and gala for stones. There are
also high frequency words denoting body parts in Sinhala, such as olluva for head, kakula
for leg, bella for neck and kalava for thighs, that are derived from pre-Sinhala languages
of Sri Lanka. The author of the oldest Sinhala grammar, Sidatsangarava, written in the 13th
century CE, recognized a category of words that exclusively belonged to early Sinhala.
The grammar lists naramba and kolamba as belonging to an indigenous source. Kolamba is the source
of the name of the commercial capital Colombo. Affinities to neighbouring languages
In addition to many Tamil loanwords, several phonetic and grammatical features present
in neighbouring Dravidian languages, setting today's spoken Sinhala apart from its Northern
Indo-Aryan siblings, bear witness to the close interactions with Dravidian speakers. However,
formal Sinhala is more similar to Pali and medieval Sinhala. Some of the features that
may be traced to Dravidian influence are the distinction between short e, o and long
ē, ō the loss of aspiration
left-branching syntax the use of the verbal adjective of kiyanavā
"to say" as a subordinating conjunction with the meanings "that" and "if", e.g.:
"I know that it is new." "I do not know whether it is new."
Foreign influences As a result of centuries of colonial rule,
contemporary Sinhala contains some Portuguese, Dutch and English loanwords.
Influences on other languages Macanese language or Macau Creole is a creole
language derived mainly from Malay, Sinhala, Cantonese, and Portuguese, which was originally
spoken by the Macanese community of the Portuguese colony of Macau. It is now spoken by a few
families in Macau and in the Macanese diaspora. The language developed first mainly among
the descendants of Portuguese settlers who often married women from Malacca and Sri Lanka
rather than from neighboring China, so the language had strong Malay and Sinhala influence
from the beginning. Numerals
Sinhala shares many features common to other Indo-European languages. Shared vocabulary
includes the numbers up to ten: Accents and dialects
Sinhala spoken in the Southern province of Sri Lanka uses several words that are not
found elsewhere in the country; this is also the case for the Central province, North-Central
province and south-eastern part. For native speakers all dialects are mutually intelligible,
and they might not even realize that the differences are significant.
The language of the Veddah people resembles Sinhala to a great extent, although it has
a large number of words which cannot be traced to another language. Rodiya people use another
dialect of Sinhala. Diglossia
In Sinhala there is distinctive diglossia, as in many languages of South Asia. The literary
language and the spoken language differ from each other in many aspects. The written language
is used for all forms of literary texts but also orally at formal occasions, whereas the
spoken language is used as the language of communication in everyday life. As a rule
the literary language uses more Sanskrit-based words.
The most important difference between the two varieties is the lack of inflected verb
forms in the spoken language. The situation is analogous to one where Middle
or even Old English would be the written language in Great Britain. The children are taught
the written language at school almost like a foreign language.
Sinhala language also has diverse slang. Some is regarded as taboo and most is frowned upon
as non-scholarly. Writing system
The Sinhala alphabet, Sinhala hodiya, is based on ancient Brahmi, as are most Indo-Aryan
scripts. In design, the Sinhala alphabet is what is called an "abugida" or "alphasyllabary",
meaning that consonants are written with letters while vowels are indicated with diacritics
on those consonants, unlike English where both consonants and vowels are full letters,
or Urdu where vowels need not be written at all. Also, when no diacritic is used, an "inherent
vowel", either or , is understood, depending on the position of the consonant within the
word. For example, the letter ක k on its own indicates ka, either or . The various
vowels are written කා kā, කැ kä, කෑ kǟ, කි ki, කී kī, කු
ku, කූ kū, කෙ ke, කේ kē, කො ko, කෝ kō. There are also a few diacritics
for consonants, such as r. For simple without a vowel, a vowel-cancelling diacritic called
hal kirīma is used: ක් k. Several of these diacritics occur in two forms, which
depend on the shape of the consonant letter. Vowels also have independent letters but these
are only used at the beginning of words where there is no preceding consonant to add a diacritic
to. The complete alphabet consist of 54 letters,
18 for vowels and 36 for consonants. However, only 36 are required for writing colloquial
spoken Sinhala. The rest indicate sounds that have gotten lost in the course of linguistic
change, such as the aspirates, are restricted to Sanskrit and Pali loan words.
Sinhala is written from left to right and the Sinhala character set is only used for
this one language. The alphabetic sequence is similar to those of other Brahmic scripts:
a/ā ä/ǟ i/ī u/ū [ŗ] e/ē [ai] o/ō [au] k [kh] g [g] ṅ c [ch] j [jh] [ñ] ṭ [ṭa]
ṭ [ṭh] ḍ [ḍh] ṇ t [th] d [dh] n p [ph] b [bh] m y r l v [ś ṣ] s h ḷ f
Phonology The presence of so-called prenasalized consonants.
A very short homorganic nasal is added before a voiced plosive. The nasal is syllabified
with the onset of the following syllable, which means that the moraic weight of the
preceding syllable is left unchanged. The pronunciation of unstressed short , which
is not written in Sinhala orthography except when initial, is a schwa [ə].
Morphology Nominal morphology
The main features marked on Sinhala nouns are case, number, definiteness and animacy.
Cases Sinhala distinguishes several cases. Next
to the cross-linguistically rather common nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and
ablative, there are also less common cases like the instrumental. The exact number of
these cases depends on the exact definition of cases one wishes to employ. For instance,
the endings for the animate instrumental and locative cases, atiŋ and laᵑgə, are also
independent words meaning "with the hand" and "near" respectively, which is why they
are not regarded to be actual case endings by some scholars. Depending on how far an
independent word has progressed on a grammaticalization path, scholars will see it as a case marker
or not. The brackets with most of the vowel length
symbols indicate the optional shortening of long vowels in certain unstressed syllables.
Number marking In Sinhala animate nouns, the plural is marked
with -o(ː), a long consonant plus -u, or with -la(ː). Most of the inanimates mark
the plural by subtractive morphology. Loan words from English mark the singular with
ekə, and do not mark the plural. This can be interpreted as singulative.
On the left hand side of the table, plurals are longer than singulars. On the right hand
side, it is the other way round, with the exception of paːrə "street". Note that [+animate]
lexemes are mostly in the classes on the left-hand side, while [-animate] lexemes are most often
in the classes on the right hand. Indefinite article
The indefinite article is -ek for animates and -ak for inanimates. The indefinite article
exists only in the singular, where its absence marks definiteness. In the plural,definiteness
does not receive special marking. Verbal morphology
Sinhala distinguishes three conjugation classes. Spoken Sinhala does not mark person, number
or gender on the verb. In other words there is no subject–verb agreement.
Syntax Left-branching language, which means that
determining elements are usually put in front of what they determine.
SOV word order, common to most left-branching languages.
As a left-branching language, there are no prepositions, only postpositions. Example:
"under the book" translates to pot̪ə yaʈə, literally "book under".
There are almost no conjunctions as English that or whether, but only non-finite clauses
that are formed by the means of participles and verbal adjectives. Example: "The man who
writes books" translates to pot̪ liənə miniha, literally "books writing man".
An exception to this is statements of quantity which usually stand behind what they define.
Example: "the four flowers" translates to mal hat̪ərə, literally "flowers four".
On the other hand it can be argued that the numeral is the head in this construction,
and the flowers the modifier, so that a better English rendering would be "a floral foursome"
Sinhala has no copula: "I am rich" translates to mamə poːsat̪, literally "I rich". There
are two existential verbs, which are used for locative predications, but these verbs
are not used for predications of class-membership or property-assignment, unlike English is.
Semantics There is a four-way deictic system: There
are four demonstrative stems meː "here, close to the speaker", oː "there, close to the
person addressed", arə "there, close to a third person, visible" and eː "there, close
to a third person, not visible". Discourse
Sinhala is a pro-drop language: Arguments of a sentence can be omitted when they can
be inferred from context. This is true for subject—as in Italian, for instance—but
also objects and other parts of the sentence can be "dropped" in Sinhala if they can be
inferred. In that sense, Sinhala can be called a "super pro-drop language", like Japanese.
Example: The sentence [koɦed̪ə ɡie], literally "where went", can mean "where did Ihewe...
go". See also
Sinhala slang Notes
References
Further reading Gair, James: Sinhala and Other South Asian
Languages, New York 1998. Gair, James and Paolillo, John C.: Sinhala,
München, Newcastle 1997. Geiger, Wilhelm: A Grammar of the Sinhalese
Language, Colombo 1938. Karunatillake, W.S.: An Introduction to Spoken
Sinhala, Colombo 1992 [several new editions]. Clough, B.: Sinhala English Dictionary, 2nd
new & enlarged edition, New Delhi, Asian Educational Services, 1997.
Gair, James. Studies in South Asian Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509521-9.
Van Driem, George. Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater
Himalayan Region. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 90-04-10390-2.
Indrapala, Karthigesu. The evolution of an ethnic identity: The Tamils in Sri Lanka C.
300 BCE to C. 1200 CE. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa. ISBN 978-955-1266-72-1.
External links Charles Henry Carter. A Sinhalese-English
dictionary. Colombo: The "Ceylon Observer" Printing Works; London: Probsthain & Co.,
1924. Simhala Sabdakosa Karyamsaya. Sanksipta Simhala
Sabdakosaya. Kolamba : Samskrtika Katayutu Pilibanda Departamentuva, 2007-2009.
Sinhala English Dictionary and Sinhala To Hindi Language Translator
Kapruka Sinhala dictionary Madura Online English-Sinhala Dictionary and
Language Translator Sinhala dictionary resources online
Viki - The Sinhala Encyclopedia USA Foreign Service Institute Sinhala basic
course Sinhala English Dictionary for Android
Sinhala Dictionary Sinhala Script
Sinhala dictionary